1) IDN Variant Problem.
Essentially the East Asian languages need to have IDN Variant implemented or else people in East Asia who buy internationalized domains would have to pay multiple times for the same domain.

2) CJK Three Characters Problem.
The policy states that top-level domain “strings must be composed of three or more visually distinct letters or characters in the script” but that clearly isn’t appropriate for East Asian languages, where ideographs do not match equally with letters in an alphabet.

These are some of the challenges facing the Internationalization of the Internet, specifically at ICANN, but there are many other interesting examples elsewhere (input method editors being another huge hurdle.)

“I just moved to the State Department from the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency and was surprised that State doesn’t use this browser. It was approved for the entire intelligence community, so I don’t understand why State can’t use it. It’s a much safer program.”

Presumably, the State Department is using Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. And we wouldn’t be surprised if it’s still mired in the eight-year-old IE6. The only thing that moves slower than Orange (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/07/08/orange_and_ie6/) is a US government agency. But the State Department has yet to respond to our questions about its Firefox-less browsing mandate.

Finkle’s fellow workers responded to his Firefox request with applause. While Clinton responded with bewilderment. “Well, apparently, there’s a lot of support for this suggestion. I don’t know the answer. Pat, do you know the answer?” she said, turning to under Secretary Pat Kennedy.

“The answer is, at the moment: It’s an expense question,” Kennedy said. Then someone in the audience pointed out that Firefox is free.